Universally Challenged

Probably the most press and PR successes for any winning team; we had a bucket load in our year in comparison to most recent winners, but our page in the Evening Standard and interview in Times 2 can’t compete with the shed-load that Trimble et al. have received since overcoming Manchester in a great final.

But all of that is forgotten because one of the ‘winning’ team forgot to read the rules and has been disqualified.

University Challenge is generally recorded in two blocks. The first (and these days the high scoring losers’ repechage and second) round in June and then the remaining knockout rounds in a long weekend in October and November. These two blocks are in different academic years and thus they required that any competitor in the first block was intending to still be at the institution at the time of the second block and subsequent broadcasts.

And, let’s be absolutely clear on this point because the rules were absolutely clear – and they’ve been that way for the entire run of the show under Jeremy Paxman – if you were in your team you had signed a form expressing your intentions.

When we competed in 95/96 we knew that we had to ensure that we’d still be students until the Final was broadcast (in May ’96 in our case). If the circumstances changed in between the two dates, you had to tell Granada.

The Corpus team claim not have realised they’d broken the rules, but then it would have been their fault for not reading them closely enough. Sam Kay should have thought to at least mention it – it beggars belief that four obviously intelligent people wouldn’t have given it any thought.

It is unfortunate for Manchester to “win” in such circumstances but it’s only a quiz show – as they told us when we discussed topics like unfair draws and dubiously phrased questions, “we’re not running the British University Quiz Championshship; it’s a TV show, it’s entertainment.”

It’s not really headline news, it’s not really important, but if you’ve just been plastered on the news pages of half the press in Britain as being intelligent and Google in human form, it is just a little embarrassing to be proven as being unable to read an application form for a TV show.